The project

The EU battery industry faces pressure to improve economic and environmental sustainability due to reliance on critical, scarce elements and environmentally unfriendly processes. The HyMetBat project is vital to address these challenges by enabling a transition to more sustainable battery chemistries and low-carbon manufacturing. This is driven by new EU regulations emphasizing sustainability and the urgent need for innovation to secure a stable supply of raw materials and reduce the carbon footprint of battery production.

The project will develop new metrology platforms to support emerging, sustainable battery technologies like high-nickel NMC and Sodium-Ion Batteries (SIBs). These advanced batteries, while promising, currently suffer from stability and cycle life issues. Understanding these degradation mechanisms requires detailed correlation of device functionality with underlying physical and chemical properties, accessible through hybrid metrology methods. Batteries are complex, undergoing significant changes during cycling, making reliable property measurement challenging.

Operando measurement, performed under charge-discharge conditions, is crucial for time-resolved correlations between material properties and electrochemical performance. However, existing methods lack confidence and traceability. Hybrid metrology, combining two or more distinct measurement techniques, is an emerging strategy to overcome these limitations and improve data confidence. The project aims to develop and validate experimental and computational methods for this approach, as few examples exist in battery applications.

Key objectives include extending existing metrology frameworks to new battery chemistries, improving analytical method discrimination, and incorporating new harmonized techniques. The project also focuses on metrology for battery materials recycling to meet EU targets and address impurities in recycled materials. Finally, it aims to develop novel hybrid-operando instrumentation and methods to enable simultaneous, multi-parameter measurements and integrate sophisticated modeling and computational tools to interpret complex data and accelerate research.

1. To develop a hybrid metrology platform comprising analytical methods to measure the (electro)chemical, structural and thermal properties of sustainable and low carbon footprint battery materials.

2. To develop new metrology approaches and procedures to support recycling of battery materials. 

3. To develop new instrumentation and traceable methodologies for coupled hybrid-operando characterisation of emerging sustainable battery materials. 

4. To develop modelling and computational tools enabled by hybrid metrology.

5. To facilitate – in cooperation with the EMPIR 20NET01 Clean Energy – the take up of the data and measurement infrastructure developed in the project by the measurement supply chain (NMIs, DIs, calibration laboratories), standards developing organisations (e.g. ISO/TC 201) and key end users (materials suppliers and battery manufacturers). To promote technology transfer of the project outputs as lab-based alternatives to synchrotron radiation-based methods, towards industry and manufacturers.  

• WP1: Development of a hybrid metrology framework based on independent ex situ and operando methods to enable traceable characterisation of new, sustainable and low carbon footprint battery chemistries

• WP2: Traceable metrology applied to battery recycling processes and materials

• WP3: Development of traceable methods and new instrumentation to enable coupled hybrid-operando characterisation of new, sustainable and low carbon footprint battery chemistries

• WP4: Computations to complement and validate experiments

• WP5: Creating impact

• WP6: Management and coordination